Layoffs Taboo, Japan Workers Are Sent to the Boredom Room (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Layoffs Taboo, Japan Workers Are Sent to the Boredom Room (2013)

nytimes.com

For a smaller company I can see how this might be a problem, but Sony is a sprawling tech company with tons of divisions. That they're paying 40 people to sit around in a room with nothing to do is simply a failure of management. It's pretty cool that Japan has such a strong social contract, that executives have responsibility to and for their workers. But the social contract isn't the problem there, it's a lack of imagination.

Exactly, large companies are going to get more than 5% turnover per year simply from people retiring / dying. If they cut back on hiring they can fairly quickly shrink and retraining is cheap when your willing to let a 50 year old worker sit in a room at full pay.

The real issue is older workers are expensive and companies want a cheap workforce not lower headcount. Society on the other hand benefits when older workers are employed and can't supply unlimited quantities of well trained and cheap workers.

In Japan, cutting back on hiring is a huge problem. If you don't get a job straight out of college, you're effectively a second-class citizen. There is no second chance, there is no plan B. The job for life cuts both ways in Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_recruiting_of_new...

This represents a giant economic opportunity for any company willing to be less stupid.

Sort of - it's a coordination problem.

If everyone else believes that second-round hires are also second-rate hires, you can't necessarily break the standard alone. First-round hires will see you as a bad company and pass, and business partners will doubt your work and look to your competitors.

Not all systemic inefficiencies are available to be fixed by individual companies; if the rest of society will punish you too badly for deviating then the inefficient solution is the "smart" one.

(Of course, there might be an opportunity to staff an American tech startup or something that doesn't need those social connections.)

Maybe an opportunity for Japanese working remotely for foreign companies?

Foreign language teaching in Japan is notoriously poor, which severely limits the opportunities for remote work. Remote work wouldn't provide many of the non-cash benefits of being a salaryman - social status, access to housing and credit and a multitude of other things.

Aha, that sounds reasonable. But still, can't help but think that there is some untapped potential here. Imagine someone from the outside learning Japanese and then hire a bunch of "second tier" japanese would-be-but-never-became salarymen. Is it unthinkable that this could foster a special loyalty to this hypothetical company?

One of the smart things my company has done in Japan is hire much higher than industry average number of women and be ahead of industry in support for maternity etc. Most Japanese companies don't really support career growth of women and so we've been lucky to access a lot of great talent.

A lot of it is ingrained in Japanese culture. The foreign firms (and smaller ones) have much more flexibility.

I think being from the US you underestimate the scale and reach of the enormous vertically integrated corporations of Japan. The US has antitrust laws which allow for a lot more potential disruption. Japan does not.

This is gradually changing. I worked for a small Japanese company that eventually went under and if I look at my ex coworkers they are doing well. Some of them became freelancer/consultants and are being paid more than people I know who work at Sharp and have been hired directly out of university.

Freelancers generally get paid more on an hourly basis than full time in part because their hours aren't guaranteed. I think in Japan this also could be due to the implied longer term guarantees implied in the full time salaries that don't need to be paid to freelancers.

Yes, definitely and as I mentioned in another comment, people who are not employed with a full time position will have a lot of difficulties getting a loan from a bank.

But, in the case of my ex-coworkers, the difference is significant enough that they are in a much better situation in term of how much money they earn and how much hours they work than people working at let's say Sharp (and Sharp is still much better than a lot of places with full time employees because they limit overtime).

My understanding is that ending up as a Freelancer is really the worst possible outcome for a Japanese salaryman.

It's not surprising they earn more because salaryman salaries are very low but they have no social status, job security, benefits, or pension that their old job gave them.

They do have pensions and health care but they have to pay for it out of their salary (which also explains the difference in term of earnings).

However at least for Software Engineers (I don't have experience in other fields), the difference is big enough to more than make up for the price of health care and pension and the loss of benefits. The only real problem is the lack of social status which means that it's very hard for a freelancer to get a bank loan to buy an house or an apartment.

> If you don't get a job straight out of college, you're effectively a second-class citizen. There is no second chance, there is no plan B.

How is this any different here in the 'States? If I'm still looking for work after I graduate, any interviews will have an unanswerable question: "why haven't you done anything since (graduation date here)?"

There are plenty of answers that will be acceptable to many employers - "I've taken a gap year to go travelling", "I've been taking my time to find the best opportunity", "I've been working towards a Masters", "I've been looking after an elderly relative", "I've been doing charity work" or even "it's a tough economy, I haven't found anything yet".

A gap in your employment history isn't ideal, but it isn't a complete showstopper, especially if you have valuable STEM skills. It's possible to retrain and change careers, it's possible to get a job through pure gumption, it's possible to work your way up from sales clerk to area manager. Not easy, but possible.

To most Japanese companies, the idea of offering a salaried position to a 22 year old is simply inconceivable. Either you get hired out of college and become a salaryman, or you bear the black mark of the freeter for the rest of your life. If you're a freeter, your chances of prosperity and security are essentially nil.

The situation for young Americans is less than ideal, but the situation for young Japanese people is Kafkaesque.

To some degree, you can do something. Contribute to OSS, or work for a charity, while looking for paid work and you can use this question as an opening.

On the other hand, studies have shown that starting a career in a bad economy will damage your salary for life...

If you let attrition drive headcount, you're going to end up with only the people who can't quit and find another job. Seen it happen.

Yup, voluntary redundancy was jokingly called the 'muppet retention policy' in a previous job. You announce to your staff that the company has some trouble, and allow all the bright, motivated, and in-demand folks to jump ship with a redundancy package, then you get to soldier on with everyone who's left, but now thoroughly demotivated.

The side effects of labour laws (and, to be clear, I am a big supporter or social / economic justice) can be really difficult.

This is very true. Look at the large US companies that were reluctant to have formal layoffs. They generally had near-monopoly positions, that enabled them to be lazy. (Ma Bell, I'm looking at you!)

I've seen it described as the Dead Sea Effect.

Sounds like the US Federal government lately.

Notably, the usual reason to dismiss older, experienced workers is that they cost more. That's why you don't retrain them for entry-level work or some unrelated task.

At the point where you're paying them to do literally nothing, there's not much reason not to redirect employees internally.

Or you know... give them something else to do?

If you're paying them anyway you might as well have internal "startup" labs trying to do original research or try new business ideas.

>In February, just two years shy of Mrs. Sato’s retirement, a manager had blunt news: “Your job no longer exists.” She refused to quit, and was dispatched to the chase-out room.

Well of course there are going to be problems when you try and lay off someone just a few years before their retirement. I don't see any big cultural differences the article references here. This just sounds like a company trying to rip off their long term workers out of their full retirement package. I'm sure if these retirement packages referenced in the article were anywhere close to what the workers would get on full retirement, of course they would take it rather than going to boredom rooms. The author of this article seems to have simply taken Sonys word that the "retirement packages were generous."

They also fail to mention that for many ' lifetime' salary man positions, the hours are really long but the pay is low.

'I heard a great line about this once, and unfortunately I cannot remember the source:

“Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.”

The best employees aren’t compensated with large option grants or eye popping bonuses — they’re simply anointed as “princes”, given their pick of projects to work on, receive plum assignments, and get their status acknowledged (in ways great and small) by the other employees.'

From http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/

Really interesting, thanks for sharing.

Does anyone know of any equivalents from other cultures of similar practices?

I mean, Chinese society also values social status quite a bit. But nowadays, being wealthy buys social status rather easily in China -- hence the almost gold rush mentality in trying to get wealthy.

I guess what I'm saying is that social status and wealth are two distinguishable things, and in some societies they correlate really well, but in others they don't, and they also have different relative values.

In the US, you can't really buy social status through money directly -- being an anonymous millionaire doesn't get you much more service or adulation than what you're willing to pay for directly.

No, you flaunt the markers. Bespoke suit, or super-huge gold jewellery and a L-L-Lamborghini, depending on your clientele.

Yeah but that's a big turnoff to a large portion of the American population.

Flaunting wealth -- much more acceptable in China.

Got it.

This is not irrelevant to startups in Japan, either. If you attempt to fire someone who you (unwisely) brought on as a full-time employee, and they contest the firing, you will be brought before a local government functionary to make your case for it.

"They're incompetent at their job." is insufficient grounds for firing. (You need to add "And we spent substantial documented effort retraining them and moving them to other positions, but we have not been able to find one where it worked out.")

I have a tiny company (just me and my wife) in Japan and my accountant tells me never to hire a full time employee. What's the startup culture like in terms of hiring? Do people accept contract positions, or do you need to hire them full time?

Your accountant gives advice very similar to the advice of my accountant and the accountants of my friends.

Japan has, essentially, a bifurcated employment market [+]. There exist people that accept contract positions; contract positions appear to be widely used within e.g. Tokyo startups. There also exist people who would not countenance a contract position.

One of the key hiring challenges in Japanese startups is finding folks who are both a) productive and b) willing to participate in the half of the labor market that people-the-system-views-as-productive do not normally participate in. (One is not normally afforded huge flexibility in switching between these systems.)

+ Slightly more fractured than this suggests.

There's also the fact that people accepting contract positions are at a significant disadvantage regarding banks if they want to get a loan to buy a house. It's considered lower status to not be a seishain.

But, on the other hand, when it comes to Software Engineering, salaries for contract positions tend to be higher and, in my experience, being a seishain or being a contract worker has no bearing on the competence of the person.

As a new (American) grad I briefly looked into working in Japan. The companies I was interested in were posting for Americans specifically, but they were still hiring people on as salarymen. The rates, even COLA-adjusted, were shockingly low. Like, top-flight companies offering bottom 10% salaries in American terms.

That whole experience has come to make way more sense as I've learned about the contractor divide, and the expectation that salaried workers will "start at the bottom".

Even at the top end, salaries in Japan are shockingly low AFAICT. Especially if you come out here to the countryside, most programmers are working for insurance companies, etc. I know people with 10 years of experience making in the 3-4 million yen (just over $30-40K USD) range. It's one of the reasons I do remote contracts.

Okay, but even from the Ebeneezer Scrooge perspective, wouldn't it still be better for the business to actually do that -- try to find something they can competently do, rather than just pay to idle them?

Or is the the Boring Room what they do with the genuinely hopeless cases?

> try to find something they can competently do

I think you're underestimating some second-order terms here:

- You saddle a team with someone who is obviously 'unwanted', which can sap that team's morale (plus that person has no relationship with the team)

- Putting them in the boring room is really a punishment meant to let other people know that they should quietly go (the NY education department also had 'rubber rooms' for teachers in similar situations)

- If your intention is really to get rid of someone, any spent time training them in a new role is literally a waste of time -- you'd rather be training someone else who will be there long term

That would be my second paragraph.

What counts as "full time"? Can you just hire everyone part-time at ~39 hrs/wk? (Which, I presume, is the strategy international chains like McDonalds would advise for their Japanese franchises.)

A slight misnomer; the relevant question is whether you're a full employee (正社員) or contract employee (契約社員).

What about letting go of someone due to shortage of work?

Run that one by a lawyer, but my understanding is that the bar is approximately "If we do not let them go, we will -- with night-follows-day-certainty -- go under."

If it's simply a matter that you hired a plumber and don't have any toilets that need plunging, well, Japanese labor law considers that Management Error and not something which rises to the exceptional bar required to consequence an employee. Hire three plumbers but only have two plumbers worth of toilets? Get better at math.

With the plumber analogy the bill usually breaks out parts and labor and labor is, well, 100% labor.

With a more Japanese-like job like salaryman at a car manufacturer, the cost of labor per car is extremely low, like $1K to $2K per car regardless of size or cost of the end product, so if you have to bury $100 somewhere in a $60K pickup truck nobody is going to notice, so you end up with "do nothing rooms".

Also don't forget "do nothing rooms" are not Exactly a wasted expense, they are purchasing an option on future labor. If labor demand increases 10% next year for whatever reason, and you fire a guy with 10 years experience, you have committed a major management error, whereas having 10% of your workforce do nothing means you bought an option that fundamentally only costs $100 per automobile sold, so that's pretty cheap insurance in case you have to ramp up or someone dies or unexpectedly retires or something.

I wonder if you could simply retain an external firm to act as the Beeminder kind of punishment-trust on a corporate level. Then you could say "if we aren't allowed to fire these employees, [this company who holds 99% of our money] is instructed and required to flush it down the toilet."

In practice the way to do things is to take a large firm and reconstruct it as a supply chain. Think like, say, a hypothetical car company. Instead of making your own engines, you source them from Engines R' Us. You might be ERU's sole customer but that is neither here nor there. If you have a bad year and need less production staff you just tell ERU "Hey, orders next quarter will be down by 60%. Plan accordingly."

ERU might have to take drastic measures. Ah, the lamentable if inevitable realities of being a small business. The car company, of course, the car company would never fire the full-time employees.

That's a fascinating account, thanks. Certainly not the first place I've heard of that restructures to avoid horizontal or vertical integration, and then funnels everything like it was one company.

Oh, huh. Interesting.

In the first season of Silicon Valley, there's a part where (spoilers) a main character gets "unassigned" from a Google parody, and it's mentioned that it's inspired by some Japanese management technique.

I didn't know that was actually true.

This is also what happens to teachers in the New York City school system after they've been caught out reading the newspaper while their students spend all class gambling. They call it the "rubber room".

Technically these teachers are awaiting reassignment, pending arbitration. This is very slow, and I understand that there is a backlog from a long period of time where very little arbitration happened, because the school system was not paying their arbitrators. (Also, they may have decentralized the rubber room in recent years to inhibit visibility.)

The article mentions that the practice was discontinued in 2010

(more spoilers)

Yeah, Big Head on the roof chilling with the other guys - awesome :-)

It really amazes me how much of that show is true.

Strong laws that aim to protect labour seem to end up being contra-productive. I've seen it in Germany, for example, where it's pretty difficult to fire full-time employees. Berlin startups therefore either force their workforce to be self-employed, or, routinely hire people with a 6-months probationary period just to fire them the week before.

History teaches us what happens without any labour protection, so that's not an option.

But a viable alternative to labour protection is a strong welfare system. That's the classic Denmark vs Germany comparison. Taxes are high in Denmark, but it's easy to hire and fire somebody. Which hurts business more?

Labor protection is much more than protection against firing.

A society needs a sane amount of labor protection. Too much and there won't be jobs (and the economy will suffer), too little and the people will have no power over their lives (and the economy will suffer).

Worse still, that optimum point will change all the time as an economy matures. And I don't think anybody has any good procedure for measuring it.

Income tax is high in Denmark, but the total tax wedge is much lower than in Germany (36.6% in of labour costs in Denmark vs. 49.4% in Germany for a single worker of average salary) [1]. The total employee contributions are similar - in Denmark 35.8% (as percent of labour cost), vs. 33.3% in Germany [2]. The rest is borne by the employer - 0.8% in Denmark vs 16.2% in Germany.

I don't know how this translates into differences in welfare spending (so it is possibly that Denmark spends more on welfare but that Germany just spends far more on other things - I haven't looked), or why the differences are so large, but of the OECD countries, Germany comes in only after Belgium (who always throne high above the rest on these lists) and Austria when it comes to the size of the tax wedge relative to total labour costs. Denmark meanwhile comes in near the OECD average, which was 35.9% in 2015.

[1] http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/taxatio...

[2] http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/taxatio...

> History teaches us what happens without any labour protection, so that's not an option.

What, you become the richest, most powerful country in the world? (I think America has the weakest labour laws in the developed world).

>What, you become the richest, most powerful country in the world?

No you do that during world war by being the only country left with with virtually no damage to factories/infrastructure due to geography.

You then use that to establish a global hegemony.

And even then it only enriches the top of your society.

Look at the US's GDP history. It started growing faster than Europe at the end of the 19th century. And you say it only enriched the top of our society? First look up what median means, then realize that the US's median income is 50% higher than Germany's. For a population several times larger and several times more diverse.

>the US's median income is 50% higher than Germany's

Source? I'm looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income and none of the sources show a difference as high as that.

Also if you look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... the US has much lower median wealth than most European economies.

I see you slipped in the word "wealth" when the GP specifically mentioned "income." Any reason for choosing one over the other?

I linked to wealth statistics alongside income statistics, because I think it's a relevant data point.

I thought the distinction was fairly clear, but perhaps I should have emphasised it more?

I thought it was a good point to bring up. Comparing raw income doesn't mean anything -- you need to at least take cost of living into account. 75k is barely livable in SF, but quite comfortable in the Midwest, etc.

If Germans are making less but are worth more... There's interesting things going on that probably need to be taken into consideration in such a conversation.

PPP (Price Purchasing Parity) is the definition of cost of living adjustments. If you see PPP, then that's already been factored in as well as the science can.

Ah, missed that on the chart. Thanks for pointing it out.

Assets minus liabilities doesn't capture the full picture.

If a poor person in the US has a $3000 car they might be poorer on paper than a middle class Singaporean who takes the bus but the latter would have to spend $100k to enjoy the same transportation lifestyle as the former.

Similar for things like detached houses and takeout food which are basic in the US but luxury items in most of the rest of the world.

> but the latter would have to spend $100k to enjoy the same transportation lifestyle as the former.

What exactly does it mean to "enjoy the same transportation lifestyle" and why would it cost them $100k? Singapore is a tiny island with fairly comprehensive public transport, and relatively inexpensive taxis. What exactly is this middle class person missing out on?

> takeout food ... luxury items in most of the rest of the world.

What makes you think that? Takeaway food is readily available in every developed country I've been in, and usually even cheaper in developing ones.

I have family in Europe and driving 25,000 km a year and eating takeout 2x a day alone would probably bankrupt them.

>driving 25,000 km a year

What matters is someone's ability to reach places they want to go, not how far they are able to drive.

> eating takeout 2x a day

This is easily possible for a middle class person in Europe (although I think most would consider it inadvisable).

That was my source also and yes the actual difference is a mere 30% more - I was eyeballing it. My point wasn't to get into a pissing contest with who is richer, my point was that the US is no less equal than Germany and no one is bitching about how Germany's economy only enriches the top.

I also linked to statistics which show that most European countries have significantly higher median wealth than the US. (Although notably not Germany for some reason). The difference between the mean and median wealth is also notably high in the US, which suggests greater inequality.

> Look at the US's GDP history. It started growing faster than Europe at the end of the 19th century.

You mean when they got access to all that land to the west that was previously inhabited by Native Americans?

Well, there was this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweatshop

And also this (which was, fundamentally, an economic institution):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States

You can't really use slavery or sweatshops as an argument one way or the other here. Sweatshops were by no means limited to the US.

Nor was slavery, for that matter. The main differences is that US slavery was domestic (and mostly contained to the south)[0]. Whereas European imperial powers (England, France, Belgium, etc.) outsourced their slavery, practicing forced relocation of people within their colonies and engaging those colonists in forced labor with the threat of violence[1]. That continued well into the 20th century.

[0] Though not as much as people like to think - the North was very happy to make money off of the slave trade, as long as they didn't permanently hold those slaves.

[1] One can try to engage in the abstract argument of, "well, is it philosophically better to enslave people within each others' native lands, rather than to bring them all to the seat of the empire and enslave them there", but that's a hair that's not worth splitting, and a far cry from the original statement.

America became the richest, most powerful country before any country had substantial labour protections.

> America became the richest, most powerful country

More accurately, this happened because every other power was laid to waste by two successive world wars. You'd have been hard pressed to find a standing factory in Germany, Britain, or Russia in June of 1945.

The manufacturing output of the US passed Britain to take first place in 1890.

https://www.quora.com/Economic-History-At-what-point-did-the...

Minor nitpick 1916, the year U.S. output overtook that of the entire British empire. And that was in the middle of WWI. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/the...

Further, the US has had several boom and bust cycles people only really hear about 'the great depression' but there have been plenty of major slumps in the US economy for example around the Civil War. So, a nominal lead in good times is not that meaningful.

So it was only during WWII that the US went from near parity to a massive and sustained lead. And it did not take that long before we gave that up to either China or the EU depending on how you want to slice it.

Uh the US is a far bigger place? The civil war kicked off our version of the second industrial revolution, and the frontier (see ailroads) acted as starter fluid.

Obviously US was looking great at that time, hence the immigration boom. (As Mark Twain went for in the name, the guilded age did have plenty of issues, but so did Europe. Class was strictly more palpable there, generally speaking.)

Then, as others with that firm foundation, we surfed tsunami of two world wars that swallowed everyone else. That seal Ed the deal (and the second got us out of the great depression).

Russia and Britain had lots of standing factories at the end of WWII.

Russia's military production had been moved away from the west of the country before Russia got there.

Britain wasn't bombed heavily. The Luftwaffe didn't have the capacity.

I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but I think my point stands that the US had many more factories left after the war, not to mention working age men. The US also had the Marshall Plan to repurpose that capacity into making products for domestic and foreign consumption.

Pedantically there is always a richest country, or most powerful country.

And the UK was much richer than the USA for a long time.

The sum of power or wealth is not a very sensible metric, unless you are a country and not a person. The per-capita median of power or wealth is a more sensible metric. A specific lower percentile may be even more sensible.

>richest, most powerful country in the world?

To be fair this happened during a period of high unionization and a top income tax rate approaching 80%, or more. I'm not saying those things caused the growth, but they didn't stop it obviously.

Also your comment is dismissive of things like income inequality, companies hoarding cash instead of investing it, healthcare access, quality of life, stagnant wages, etc and other things have the US hasn't solved but has been better addressed in more liberal nations. That high GDP is nice, but it doesn't stop poverty in the south side of Chicago nor does it create jobs in the rust belt. Maybe if we took these issues more seriously we wouldn't have elections where loud-mouth populists win due to electorate anger and instead have a system of government that reflects the needs of the people more than corporations.

> Taxes are high in Denmark, but it's easy to hire and fire somebody.

In Sweden it's not only hard to fire someone, but expensive as well.

In Germany It is also called "Katzentisch" (cat table). This practice got famous during the privatization of state enterprises. It was later supplemented by unsuitable tasks. For example woman had to handle heavy packages without proper equipment.

Those situations certainly happen; whether it's contra-productive depends on the overall effects, not just whether some cases exists.

That said, some of these are just a result of incompetence by the legislators and/or courts. It's been a few years, but I've seen organizations in my country trying that "self-employed" and the Labour Court straightened them pretty quickly when they tried to fire someone. If you have a boss, fixed place of work, working hours, etc, you won't fool anyone.

The six-month probationary period is mostly fixed by not allowing it to be constantly renewed. Replacing all your workflow twice a year (even if gradually) is a heavy tax.

I have always heard this but never seen any real documented proof.

Its certainly not hard to fire/layoff people in the UK

"routinely hire people with a 6-months probationary period just to fire them the week before"

That's not due to labor law. That's due to the boss being a complete asshole.

The company that employs my girlfriend fires full-time employees all the time. so it can't be that hard .

As a European, I am always amazed to hear about the agility in the US job market. i.e. quitting/getting fired with < a week's notice, being used to a 3-6 month's notice. It's interesting to see that the other extreme also exists.

On the flip-side, it's described as a terrible, terrible risk to hire anyone in a European country, because you're signing up for so much responsibility for them. You'd better really need someone before you hire them. You'd better really vet them because getting rid of a bad egg is nigh impossible. (Or so the narrative goes.)

Also you may end up working at a place full of bad eggs. Prospective employees in Europe who have an interest in a productive life also have to vet the company to make sure they select employees carefully and put the effort to get rid of who shouldn't be there. And that's hard to do unless you know someone inside.

It is! There's usually a 3-month evaluation period for tech jobs where I live, but I've never seen anyone getting fired in that time.

In the UK I sometimes feel like we get the worst of both worlds.

There's a perception that it's nigh impossible to fire someone and that jobs are very secure, which leads to fairly conservative hiring policies and quite low wages (in the tech sector anyway - definitely low relative to contracting here or the equivalent job in the USA).

In reality, jobs really aren't that secure after all. I personally worked for a rather cut-throat small company that fired at least 4 people during the short time I worked there. They'd all worked there for less than a year. I knew all of them personally, and none of them were terrible at their jobs or really deserved to be fired. I'm convinced one of them was fired just because his project came to an end and he was no longer required.

You can't make a claim for unfair dismissal until you've worked somewhere for at least 2 years, so if you're fired before that time you've got very few options legally.

I can't speak about after the 2 years has elapsed because I've got no experience of that. Maybe then it really does become very difficult to fire someone. But people move around more often these days, I'm sure a large percentage of most employers' workforces are under the 2 year mark at any time.

IBM and all of their massive "redundancy" layoffs are a clear indication of how easy it is to get rid of people in the UK.

> IBM and all of their massive "redundancy" layoffs are a clear indication of how easy it is to get rid of people in the UK.

No, it's an indication that a massive company with lots of resources is able to cover its legal bases enough that it can lay off large numbers of people in batches. That doesn't mean it's easy by any means.

European countries differ, but the tales are alike.

At least for Germany, if you want to get rid of somebody (outside the public sector), you can. If you don't know about somebody's qualifications, you have 6 months of evaluation and can start with a limited contract for up to two years (and companies routinely do).

If people underperform (or are otherwise unfit for the job), you can get rid of them after a small number of written warnings to notify them, so they can try to improve (somewhat similar to a performance improvement plan).

But that tale is very useful to keep employees subservient: "Be grateful that we take the risk of employing you, so better don't stick your neck out by asking for something outrageous such as a higher salary!", and so employers keep telling it.

Too be fair, employers in the US also describe hiring someone as a monumental risk.

As a contractor I've come to appreciate more liquid labor markets. Jobs are not marriages. In an ideal environment people should be able to move between jobs easily.

The downside of making it hard to fire someone is that employers guard against that by making the hiring process more rigorous. The law of unintended consequences strikes again.

I'm excited about the trend towards a 1099 economy. The caveat being that doing that requires the development of better social safety nets for income and healthcare, which doesn't seem to be the happening...

The problem with this is that you need to live in a place where there's a lot of relevant jobs. Even in a big metro area if jobs are too far away (on the opposite side of the metro area) it means you need to pack up and move every time you get a new job.

It works out well for you if you're a contractor and are single and have no kids and enjoy having no more belongings than you can pack in a few boxes.

If the US job market is so "agile" then why are companies so conservative in hiring and obsessed with not making the wrong decision? I've heard it on the hiring side at multiple companies in the past: "He's a good candidate but I have this small concern. Let's play it safe and talk to the next guy!" WHY? If it's so easy to fire someone if they ended up a lemon?

Legally firing someone is easy, but the cost of bringing someone on, getting them up to speed, having them become part of a team only to discover you wasted all that money and time and need to start that process again months later with a now slightly demoralized team who has less confidence in the hiring process is very significant.

I'd be curious to see an itemized list of such costs and compare the total to the opportunity cost of waiting another 2 months for the ultra-perfect candidate.

I'd be astonished if it's less expensive than waiting 2 months. A new employee costs a hunch of time for existing employees and is a net negative at first, and that ignores the wasted salary and cost and delay of starting the process again months later.

Because hiring people that you think you'll probably fire is not a nice thing to do: people quit jobs or reject other offers based on it.

I was involved in a hiring decision once where we were on the fence but made the hire because we really needed to fill the position. The person didn't work out for all the reasons we expected, and we fired them ~3 months later. It was really shitty, and I will never do it again. It's counterproductive, and it's unethical.

I don't understand why this is so terrible. Having been rejected for new jobs after clearing a lengthy interview process many times, I would much rather an employer just give me a chance. Then if I fail, at least I'll know it's not for me.

Think about it again in terms of what the parent said in the second paragraph: You, tboyd47, are hired but the employer correctly anticipated during the interview process that you would not be able to succeed but needed a body and you were the closest match. Did you really fail if you never had a chance? That's why he said it was unproductive and unethical.

If I get a job, stay in it for 3 months, and still can't succeed in it, then I would consider that a fair chance no matter what the person really thought of me. Not being given the job at all (and, if they hire like most companies I know, not being given a reason why) would make me feel more like I haven't been given a chance.

> why are companies so conservative in hiring and obsessed with not making the wrong decision?

Given that you're here on HN, you're probably biasing towards high skills jobs like software where a bad hire can really screw up the productivity of the entire team and project for a long time.

With lower-skilled jobs, employers are happy to hire and dump as their demand changes over time. Look at how many cashiers and customer service folks get hired right before the holiday season and then get canned after Christmas.

> WHY? If it's so easy to fire someone if they ended up a lemon?

it still costs money to bring the person up to speed, not to mention the opportunity costs involved in not having the right person for that much longer.

and many employers even in the US are terrified they'll be sued for wrongful termination. or they just don't want to risk having to do something viewed as "mean".

its easy but there are still costs to the org to onboard an employee and it still reflects poorly on the hiring manager to have hired the wrong/bad candidate

I don't know in other countries, but in Spain you can get fired with two weeks notice

Very similar to the Rubber Rooms in various school districts around the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rubber_Room

To note though, that's due to the strong unions in unionized school districts, lest anyone think its a regular feature of the American labor market.

Indeed, the article even mentions it in passing:

>New York had “rubber rooms” where it put teachers who would sit — with full pay — while the city tried to fire them. The practice was ended in 2010.

First learned about this from This American Life:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/350/...

And, yes, it was the first thing I thought of, too, when I saw this thread.

With an aging population, how can you simultaneously have too many workers? Or how can you allow such misallocation of workers? These workers have a good 10 to 20 productive years left in them but instead they ate left to while away time rather than have them be productive for another company which is understaffed.

> With an aging population, how can you simultaneously have too many workers?

Automation.

> how can you allow such misallocation of workers?

Try telling a "sarariman" that from tomorrow he's supposed to be a janitor. "Workers" are people, and over a certain age most people simply don't like change, let alone change for the worse. It's not as simple as reallocating bodies.

I understand the implications but at the same time simply whiling away time unproductively has to take both a mental and physical toll. The companies are essentially saying "we don't need you/want you, but we're obliged to keep you, even though we'd rather not". How can you even socialize with productive workers who likely see you as a kind of parasite (parasites having currency in Japan as people who mot only don't contribute but take away).

Well, that depends on the number of jobs available, right? Also, most highly developed nations have low population growth and aging populations.

>Mr. Tani’s managers at Sony are already upping the ante. Starting this month, the company has ordered him to work 12-hour shifts on an assembly line at a Sony plant in Toyosato, more than an hour’s drive away. He says he will comply.

Now might be a good time to take that 54 month severance pay offer.

I would love to be hired by Sony (even on commission) to figure out something valuable for those forty holdouts in the story to do. There is probably something you can do with that talent that is better than having them sit around.

Yup it's odd isn't it. I bet more than one of them has an idea for a Sony product or other start up idea, and the rest of them have all the time in the world to develop it -- on full pay, no less. And if they don't have the skills, well they also have plenty of time to learn.

It also sounds to me like a management failure.

A probably silly question from someone without any understanding of the relevant laws: I'm assuming that it is ok to fire employees when a company goes bankrupt, even when that company is fully owned by another company that is still doing well. Would it be possible to create a new subsidiary for each new employee?

The subsidiary's CEO (only employee) would need to generate revenue as dictated by the company's chairman of the board, which would effectively be the employee's direct manager.

I imagine there would be tons of complications, but wonder whether that could work in theory.

This seems like a page right out of Catbert's book of management tricks.

Labor regulations are counterproductive because by making firing harder they make hiring harder.

I do think it's a balancing act though - we are incredibly lucky in tech where we can have infinite flexibility in what we do. If you are working at Walmart I actually think reasonable protections should be provided.

Why?

"Reasonable" protections unduly impose costs on companies and may cause disemployment effects.

Now I know you'll say "companies are evil", but shareholders and banks loan to companies. When companies make profit some people make a profit.

If you have noble goals of helping the poor, a NIT (negative income tax) which transfers money to the poor would be more efficient.

Sure, protect the disadvantaged is my only goal - it's definitely worth trying your idea to do it.

By the same logic, medical schools are counterproductive because by making getting a degree harder make giving healthcare advice harder. Ditto for law schools.

If you are going to throw your lot with an employer, you want to be very sure that said employer is willing to go the extra mile to bring you up and see you succeed; and yes, that will be harder that going to work for the first john that waves a $20USD bill in front of your nose.

Employment does not make sense otherwise. No regulation, or much relaxed regulation, would be the equivalent of owning a capital intensive company that signs a deal to work exclusively for one customer. No sane investor would want to put more than 5% of their networth there, and only in the case that said investment paid heads and shoulders above the next best option in the market. So why do you expect employees to invest 100% of their time and effort in such a Devil's deal?

> By the same logic, medical schools are counterproductive because by making getting a degree harder make giving healthcare advice harder. Ditto for law schools.

They do make healthcare and lawyers more expensive. It is a question of whether the government should force a minimum standard on buyers which removes cheaper sellers that do not conform to the standards.

> If you are going to throw your lot with an employer, you want to be very sure that said employer is willing to go the extra mile to bring you up and see you succeed; and yes, that will be harder that going to work for the first john that waves a $20USD bill in front of your nose.

That's your opinion and you are free to ask your employer a contract that makes it harder to fire you.

What I'm talking about is the government mandating this.

As a corollary of 2nd Celine Law: Freedom of association is only possible between equals.

What I am talking about is that it is good an proper to have employee friendly Labor Laws, because under ordinary circumpstances the asymetry of power between employers and employees is simply too great.

The Japan case is simply an excesive case, - more suitable for a medieval society that our current one, - but the contrary of a stupid idea is another stupid idea. US style "employment at will" is the bane of all free people's everywhere. You cannot possibly be concerned with the multiple civic duties of free citizenship if your means of life are held hostage by a plutocrat elite.

> As a corollary of 2nd Celine Law: Freedom of association is only possible between equals.

Why?

> What I am talking about is that it is good an proper to have employee friendly Labor Laws, because under ordinary circumpstances the asymetry of power between employers and employees is simply too great.

The asymmetry of power between a manager and an employee is not large. The asymmetry of power between a company and an employee is large because a company is composed of much more people than an employee.

Employees can negotiate for whatever conditions they want.

> You cannot possibly be concerned with the multiple civic duties of free citizenship if your means of life

As I said, such labor laws can make employment harder because the company doesn't want to hire the wrong person and be unable to fire that person.

> plutocrat elite.

Who?

Sounds a bit like what John Sculley did to Steve Jobs.

Remember the Rubber Rooms in NYC schools?

I feel like I have worked with people in corporate who sought these situations out. A no-work job was their goal, and boy did they work hard trying to achieve it.

I've always found it surprising how easy it is to find yourself in a no-work situation like this at a large corporation, without even trying!

Projects will end, people and managers will get shuffled around and suddenly you have no direct work responsibilities for months and months. Sometimes years if you were to let it go on like that.

It is something that sounds great, but if you have any drive at all it will drive you crazy after a month or two. I'd hop on Hacker News only to find all the links were already visited. I would try to learn some new technologies but it didn't have the same impact that learning them out of necessity had.

Eventually you have to sound the alarm to people that you don't have work to do, sometimes repeatedly, before they will 'fix' the problem by assigning you somewhere else.

I honestly think that this is the default state that workers settle into at many large companies. There are some small percentage of highly productive workers doing a ton of work, and a lot of very low productivity workers making up the rest of the ranks.

I've never worked at a startup, but one of the things that I think I would find appealing about them is that there are so few people that everyone's function would be important and that situations like the above would be difficult to go unnoticed.

I did this for a Big Co for some months.

In retrospective, it was probably the best time I had in that company. That's how I got back into programming after spending several years "consulting" (sending emails, doing powerpoints and excel spreadsheets, doing meetings, blegh), which was a very good way to get my startup up and running when I was finally laid off.

The only bad part was when someone came looking for "someone unassigned". These were really dull tasks which literally anyone could make, like moving data from paper to spreadsheet.

Or that time when I had to "help" a this guy with a MS Access database that he had been working on for weeks. It was such an atrocious thing. I remember there was a column called "Money". Sometimes it had a number. Others it had a currency name. I redid the whole thing in an afternoon, with Excel. But the guy was someone's son and was impossible to let go.

So they let me go.

The severance package was great, a good safety net for my startup, so it was ok at the end :)

> It is something that sounds great, but if you have any drive at all it will drive you crazy after a month or two.

Jeez, I get disheartened waiting for a docker image to build. I think I'd go nuts if I had to sit around with (effectively) nothing to do.

> It is something that sounds great, but if you have any drive at all it will drive you crazy after a month or two.

My laptop is being repaired since last week and I'm on a temporary desktop now, desperately trying to find things to do that won't cause merge conflicts with the unpushed work that's on my harddrive. Just got told the CPU fan that arrived was the wrong size and I'll have to wait another week to resume work on the tasks that I was doing before.

I feel like I'm going crazy already, and it's been just a week!

Ha this happened to me once when I was hired as a contractor to take over another employee's responsibility. The guy refused to train me (or talk to me) and I just sat around for 6 months with absolutely no work to do. I've had other instances where work was really light after a big release and we essentially did busy work until the next iteration was approved by the higher ups

Not to mention actively subverting people who want to achieve something, adding more load to the rest of the team and just being a motivation drain.

I've worked in a post socialist worker owned company where this culture existed - eg. a guy came to work doing nothing for 5 years because his role was obsolete, he was old and failed to retrain but was 5 years off retirement age, he was there all his life and family friends with middle management - so they covered for him. Coming in every day 8-4 doing nothing but web surfing in the corner of the office. Why should anyone else there do any work ? He wasn't the only one who got obsoleted with new tech, other people his age retrained successfully - he was a failure and he got rewarded.

Plenty of situations like that in that company made me hate social criteria in work environment - even if I was required to do very little work and paid relatively well - I quit on my own because I wasn't able to accomplish almost anything significant in two years there even tough there were plenty of opportunities if the incentive structure was right. Leave social security to social services, UBI or whatever - don't screw with incentives or create blocks for people who actually want to do work. They did eventually fall apart in a few years when the political connections and money infusions dried out during the financial crisis.

I have too, and I don't really begrudge them for it. A former boss was elated when he got to switch to a quiet, slow-moving department because he'd leave work at 5pm sharp every single day and get to spend more time with his kids.

It really just depends what your priorities in life are.

I almost automatically closed the tab because it looked like a paywall. Why do I have to click "Show full article" to see the article on the page for that article? O_O

Depending on who you ask, it's one or more of:

1) So that the "free articles this month" counter doesn't decrement for stories you don't actually read.

2) So that they get metrics on which articles people actually read vs. loading in a tab and forgetting about.

3) Forcing an interaction manipulates your psychology so that you pay more attention to the page, increasing engagement.

I vaguely remember implementing this exact thing for at least two clients, and if remember correctly the reason is that such a 'show full article' button allows anything 'below the fold' (meaning the button) to be more prominently visible.

It's a rather ironic that I had to turn off my uMatrix filters to get the full 'experience' of that button.

Because it's the mobile version of the site. That button doesn't appear on the desktop version.

I’ve noticed a lot of news sites have started doing this. I assume it’s something to do with collecting analytics?

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